Laura Ford

Born 1961

Laura Ford studied at Bath Academy of Art between 1978 and 1982, including a period at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. She subsequently followed the graduate programme in sculpture at Chelsea School of Art. Her tutors have included Richard Deacon, Peter Randall-Page, Anthony Gormley and Anish Kapoor. While still a student, she participated in a major exhibition of sculpture at the Serpentine and Hayward Galleries alongside many of her tutors as well as Richard Wentworth and David Nash. In 2005 she represented Wales in the Venice Biennale.

Since then she has been featured many solo and group shows in the UK and venues abroad in the USA, Germany and Spain; her work is represented in a similarly wide range of public collections.

The use of large-scale animal figures, or people dressed as animals, is a strong element in her work; she uses these to create surreal and haunting representations of human emotions and frailties.